in His image...

Wow, I will post sometime about these last two amazing weeks.  I have been to Urbana 2012 in St. Louis, and I have been to Passion 2012 in Atlanta.  God has shown up in so many ways, and I can never stop being amazed at how big He is; God has revealed more of His heart to me in these days, and I am overwhelmed by His outside of logic love.  It is truly incomprehensible.  All glory to Him.  I want my whole life to proclaim His glory.  He is the God who runs to us while we are still far from Him.  He searches relentlessly for us, and He calls us to Him.  He is so so so worthy of all praise and admiration. Truly, no amount of words I can say can truly captivate His majesty.

God amazes me by revealing His truths to me.  Yes, like a child I have heard His word and been amazed.  I am so unworthy, but it is through Jesus and The Holy Spirit that I have been counted worthy to hear God's word.  Jesus says that God is happy to reveal His word to His children (Matthew 11:25-26), and He has.

This is what I heard as I was sitting in a dome with 60-69,000 other people...
God is infinitely perfect, and He is in a three part community with Himself through the trinity.  We are made in God's image, but through the fall we have been rendered incomplete.  We are born in two parts: body and soul.  However, when we accept Christ's invitation to salvation, He comes to live in us as The Holy Spirit.  It is then that we become more like God in three parts: body, soul, and The Holy Spirit.

I thought this was a cool revelation, and I wanted to share.  Thanks and praise be to God for moving us towards Him.  May we grow more towards His perfect will each day.

Reminiscing

I am prepping spiritually for Urbana 2012 and Passion 2013, so I was flipping through my prayer journal I take places like that.  I found this which I wrote when I went on a mission trip to the Ooglala Native American Reservation in South Dakota....
[This was my reaction of my first sighting of the Badlands...]

Each time I blinked and my eyes opened yet again, I never ceased my amazement.  Like the psalmist, my heart sang at the work of my Lord's hands.  The light touched parts of the undulating sand mounds casting shadows.  The vastness of this seemingly separate world spread further than the horizon.  God truly does make beautiful things out of the dust.



P.S. These pictures don't do it justice.

The Badlands are named for their desolation.  These lands gave me a physical affirmation that God can and will and does create beauty out of desolation.  The hues of red riveted about the sand statues, and as the sun set, the red hues intensified turning later to blue and purple.  Although we listened to a devotional, my eyes were locked on that piece, on that glimpse, of heavenly and majestic beauty.

When the Night was Animate

The radio guzzled drunkenly, white noise in the presence of my louder thoughts.
Clouds, fallen, hovered visible only at an angle in the yellow street-lamp light;
ethereal spirits dancing to that white noise.
The grass groaned with the weight of that first frost;
the leaves had given up their fiery garb of the fall.
The wind cat-called through the flattened landscape, and the trees rustled back flirtatiously.
Winter stepped in, a fair gentleman, he would grow bitter with age of course, but for now he was content to simply redden my cheeks in a paradoxical blush.
I stilled my breath to observe, accompanied only by the winking stars, and we gazed together pensively watching the animate night.